No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels #3)(69)

And inches away from each other.

This was the risk she had vowed to take; his knowledge was the reward.

Excitement thrummed through her, promising more than she could have expected when she’d left the house this evening. “I should like to begin with kissing.”

Chapter Eleven

She might have wanted to begin with kissing, but he wanted to end with her naked, spread across his desk, open to his hands and mouth and body, like a country summer.

And that was the problem.

He could not give her what she wanted. Not without taking everything he desired.

Dammit. She was too close. He took a step back, grateful for his long legs and the firm edge of his desk behind him providing stable, unmoving comfort. “I do not think Bourne would appreciate my instructing you in . . .” He trailed off, finding it difficult to say the word.

The lady did not have the same problem. “Kissing?”

He supposed he should be happy she had not asked about the other thing she seemed to have no difficulty referencing. “Yes.”

She tilted her head, and he could not help but be drawn to the long cord of her neck, the soft white skin there. “I don’t think he would mind, you know,” she said after a long moment. “In fact, I think he would be rather happy that I asked you.”

He laughed—if one could call the loud, quick ha of disbelief a laugh. “I think you couldn’t be more wrong.”

Bourne would kill him with his bare hands for touching her. Not that it wouldn’t be worth it.

It would be worth it.

He knew that without question.

She shook her head. “No, I think I’m right,” she said, more to herself than to him, he sensed, and there was a long moment while she pondered the question.

He’d never known a woman to think so carefully. He could watch her think for hours. For days. The ridiculous thought startled him. Watch her think? What in hell was wrong with him?

He didn’t have time to consider the answer because something changed in her gaze, partially hidden by the glass of her spectacles when she focused on him once more. “I don’t think this is about Bourne at all.”

It wasn’t. But she needn’t know that. “Bourne is one of the many reasons why I won’t tell you about it.”

She looked down at her hands, clenched tightly in front of her, and when she spoke there was something he did not like in her tone. “I see.”

She shook her head, and he could do nothing but look down at her pale, yellow hair, the color of cornsilk, gleaming in the candlelight.

He shouldn’t ask. It didn’t matter. “What do you see?”

She spoke to herself, softly, without looking up. “It never occurred to me. Of course, it should have. Desire is a part of it.”

Desire. Oh yes. It was an enormous part of it.

She looked up at him, then, and he saw it. Part uncertainty, part resignation, part—damn him to hell—sadness. And everything he had, everything he was, screamed to reach out to her.

Dear God. He tried to put more space between them, but his massive desk—the one from which he’d drawn such comfort just seconds earlier—was now trapping him there, altogether too close to her as her big blue eyes grew liquid, and she said, “Tell me, Mr. Cross, do you think I might convince him to touch me?”

He could have managed the words if not for their intonation—for the slight, panicked emphasis on the him, meaning someone other than he. Meaning Castleton.

Meaning she had been hoping for Cross to touch her.

She was temptation. She was torture.

All he had to do was reach out and take her. No one would ever know. Just once. Just a taste, and he would send her on her way, to her husband. To her marriage.

To her life.

No.

She was untouchable. As untouchable as every other woman he’d known for the last six years. More untouchable.

Infinitely better.

His throat worked as he searched for words, hating that she’d rendered him speechless. If his partners could see him now, clever Cross, laid low by this bizarre, bespectacled, beautiful woman.

The words did not come, so he settled on, “Pippa . . .”

Color flooded her cheeks, a wicked, wonderful blush—the kind that a younger, reckless Cross would have read as invitation. The kind he would have accepted.

Instead, she looked back at her hands, spread them wide, not knowing how those crooked fingertips tempted him. “I’m sorry. That was thoroughly . . . It was . . . that is . . .” She sighed, her shoulders bowing with near-unbearable weight. Finally, she looked up and said, simply, “I should not have said it.”

Don’t ask her. You don’t want to know.

Except he did. Desperately.

“What did you mean by it?”

“I would rather not tell you.”

One side of his mouth kicked up. Even now, when she no doubt wished to do so, she would not lie. “And yet I would know.”

She spoke to her hands. “It’s just that . . . since we met, I have been rather . . . well, fascinated by . . .”

You.

Say it, he willed, not entirely certain what he would do if she did, but willing to put himself to the test.

She took another breath. “By your bones.”

Would she ever say anything expected? “My bones?”